Kindle to the rescue

As a postscript to my rant of a few minutes ago, most of the book series I mentioned in my previous post are available on Kindle, so if you liked the movie adaptations of the first books in those series, you can at least go to the books to see how things progress, even if Hollywood abandoned its adaptation plans after one installment of each series. The Golden Compass trilogy, all the Lemony Snicket books, and all the Percy Jackson books are only a click away on your K1 or K2. The Spiderwick Chronicles books, however, are not yet available on Kindle. But they look really cute in their actual printed book form, so perhaps that's still the better way to read them, anyway.

The fate of Percy

I don't know about you, but I thought the film Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was pretty good. I mean it wasn't Lord of the Rings good, but what fantasy movie is? In the end, it was a decent adventure that cleverly combined urban grittiness with high fantasy, and, well, I'm ready for the next chapter. But will there be a next chapter?

Hollywood always does this. Trying to duplicate the success of the Harry Potter phenomenon, it launches series after series based on popular book series, then gets cold feet and abandons them when the first installment doesn't do Harry Potter numbers. Whatever happened to letting a series slowly build a following?

The Golden Compass was a good movie back in 2007, but it "only" made $70,107,728 at the North American box office, soooooo.... cancelled! No more installments.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events made $118,634,349 back in 2004. Not bad, right? Sorry, not good enough. No more installments!

My personal favorite among these examples was 2008's The Spiderwick Chronicles. Cool little movie from a popular book series. Young adult vibe, but scary, creative, and wonderfully directed. But it's respectable but unspectacular $71,195,053 box office take didn't calm the nerves of its investors, so no go and no future Chronicles.

Will Percy Jackson be the next to suffer this fate? Probably, because once again, we have a decent but not Harry Potter-level box office take (almost $80,000,000 after several weeks in theaters) so I'm betting things won't bode well for our young human/Olympian and adaptations of the remaining Rick Riordan books likely won't happen.

But I hope I'm wrong. C'mon, Hollywood, let things build a little! Make a little less, or maybe even take a loss (horrors!) on the first one or two installments of a series if you really think you've got something, and give the public time to figure out what you've got. It's the right thing to do, and your financial chickens will eventually come home to roost, too. And probably in a big way.

Just, please, no more engaging, polished first installments of a new "series", followed by a big silence.

Smart guy

A man goes into a bar and seats himself on a stool. The bartender looks at him and says, "What'll it be, buddy?"

The man says, "Set me up with seven shots of whiskey and make them doubles." The bartender does this and watches the man slug one down, then the next, then the next, and so on until all seven are gone almost as quickly as they are served. Staring in disbelief, the bartender asks why he's drinking so much so fast.

"You'd drink them this fast, too, if you had what I have," he says.

The bartender hastily asks, "What do you have, pal?"

The man replies, "Only a dollar."

Good daily newspaper

Since being offered on the Kindle, I've purchased one or two issues of the International Herald Tribune. It's a good daily newspaper, with a broad international perspective. Just be aware that it's mainly a compilation newspaper that pulls its stories and features from the world's prominent newspapers and news sources, including many you may already subscribe to on your Kindle.

But if you don't already get items like the New York Times Latest News blog and some of the dollar-a-month wire service news blogs (or won't mind the slight redundancy in articles if you do), go for it. Like the handful of other Kindle newspapers I've experienced, the Kindle edition of the International Herald Tribune is laid out well, is easy to navigate, and features a generous allotment of photographs.

A Kindle subscription to the International Herald Tribune costs $9.99 per month, or you can purchase a single issue (as I do every now and then) for 99 cents.

You may not have heard this one...

A very drunk man gets on the bus late one night, staggers up the aisle, and sits down next to a prim and proper elderly woman. The old woman clearly is not happy with this development.

Finally, she can't contain herself any longer and looks the man up and down. "I've got news for you," she says. "You're going straight to Hell!"

The man jumps up out of his seat and shouts, "Darn, I'm on the wrong bus!"

Oscar postscript

Congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker for their Best Picture and Best Director wins at the Academy Awards! I like to think that I'm a big enough man to be gracious even though my own one or two horses in the race didn't come through for the big prizes in the end. In fact, now that it's out on DVD, maybe I should take one more look at The Hurt Locker and see if maybe I missed something the first time around. For now, though, it's time for bed.

Pre-Oscar post!

Well, today is Oscar day (Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin will preside over the distribution of the gold statuettes beginning at 8:00 p.m. Eastern tonight), so in recognition of all the hoopla and fun coming up, here are my very own one-sentence mini reviews of the ten films nominated for Best Picture.

Avatar

Stunning visuals and lovely character moments eventually make you stop caring about the boilerplate, by-the-numbers story you've seen countless times before.

Inglourious Basterds

Viewers ultimately didn't mind that they were tricked into buying tickets to a heavily subtitled, foreign language art film once they saw that, hey, those could be great, too!

District 9

Effective shaky-cam mock documentary, top notch in its own right, further pays off with a moving third act about a boy alien and his dad trying to save each other, and the buffoonish yes-man human who finally develops a conscience and spine and helps them.

The Hurt Locker

Perfectly okay story of bomb diffusers in Iraq nevertheless still has me wondering what all the shouting is about.

A Serious Man

If you can take a little of the Coen Brother's trademark late-film artiness and ambiguity, you'll enjoy this funny, well told tale of a guy who recieves every kind of bad news possible and the various rabbis in his 1960's midwestern Jewish community who try to help him.

An Education

Story of a young girl learning the ways of the world is one you've seen many times before, but lovely acting and a few new twists to the old tune (such as parental characters who are in many ways as naive as their daughter) kick this up a notch.

The Blind Side

I'm a sucker for a moving story and a tour-de-force lead performance, but I'm in the minority on this one and feel this just-okay film doesn't particularly display exceptional qualities on either count, elements I realize everyone else is raving about.

Precious

Memorable, tough, take-no-prisoners movie doesn't sugarcoat a thing and only delivers the barest glimmers of hope (and those, grudgingly) to its central character.

Up in the Air

Engaging character study of a corporate downsizer and his dealings with the people around him is bolstered by sharp writing and effectively stylish direction.

Up

Spotlighting two refreshingly offbeat leads- a grumpy senior citizen and a shy, somewhat pudgy youngster- this is a terrific animated adventure that delivers everything one expects from Pixar.

Well, there you have it, my own thumbnail thoughts. And my own preferences for this evening? I'll be happy if either Avatar or Inglourious Basterds wins. The former deserves it for its truly historic box-office run and the latter because, well, it's pretty much my favorite of the bunch. But you won't see me booing if something else sneaks in, as long as it isn't The Blind Side or The Hurt Locker. On the former front, I just don't think it's a very good movie. Of the latter, I like Kathryn Bigelow a lot but I think she's done much better films than the one Hollywood has picked to finally notice.

But we'll all see what happens later. After all, that's the fun of it, right?